Here’s a piece of that article from Matt that relates to the new sales and contract management offerings embedded in CRM 7.0:

Relationships — a contact person’s relationship has always been time dependent. Now, you can display the expired contacts of an account and re-activate them if necessary. This saves salespeople’s time when maintaining relationship master data.

Data Quality Manag
ement — The Data Quality Management framework provides a set of tools for managing account and contact records. This includes validation groups that can contain thousands of records identified using SAP CRM customer segmentation; validation tasks that can be performed once or periodically against a validation group; and predefined task types such as integrated and external duplicate checks, external postal address validation, and external content validation.

Opportunity— The opportunity transaction in SAP CRM 7.0 offers standard credit check functionality that was previously only available for quotes and sales orders. This ensures that companies focus on viable customer opportunities and do not waste time and money on invaluable ones. In addition, you can now manage pricing conditions and price totals in the opportunity header for the entire document. Previously, this functionality was only available at the item level. This simplifies maintenance for standard cost saving strategies across opportunity items.

Calendar and groupware — You can now create and manage activity records directly in the SAP CRM calendar with a new drag-and-drop navigation option for adjusting the activity start and end times. This allows users to easily identify and adjust scheduling conflicts. Client-side groupware integration also gives you more control over account and contact creation in SAP CRM from the groupware client, including only new contacts, block account creation, and contact creation. Also, for Microsoft Exchange groupware users, a new Microsoft Outlook pane allows users to assign activities to SAP CRM accounts, contacts, and sales documents without switching to the CRM WebClient UI.

Territory Management — Some of the enhancements made to Territory Management in SAP CRM 7.0 include authorization based o
n territory assignment; a search for accounts, products, and business transactions with territory as the criteria; integration with the Rule Engine for modeling and evaluating rules based on territory; and mass update reports for territory re-alignments. This all helps companies get more out of their investment in a Territory Management implementation.

Payment card processing — You can process payment cards in SAP CRM sales orders when you use CRM Billing. This improvement allows the triggering of re-authorization for credit cards, as well as many other features for security and the execution of settlement processing with the clearinghouse in the Online Transaction Processing (OLTP) system.

Communication-Enabled Business Processes (CEBPs) — Another new feature in the SAP CRM 7.0 sales environment are CEBPs. For example, this functionality allows a lead processor to identify available sales representatives from the parties involved in the assignment block and transfer a live call with a customer directly to the available salesperson. You can form teams across geographic boundaries and even organizational lines. This enables you to attract, transact with, and support customers through multiple communication channels, getting them into the hands of the team member with the best expertise even if they are not directly part of the call center organization.

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